


Watch

by cynthia_arrow (thesilverarrow)



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies), Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006)
Genre: M/M, slightly AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-11
Updated: 2013-03-11
Packaged: 2017-12-04 23:35:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/716335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesilverarrow/pseuds/cynthia_arrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Jack slinks up behind him, up onto the forecastle deck where James has the job nobody else is particularly designed—or inclined, quite frankly—to do: keep watch.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Watch

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally posted many, many moons ago on livejournal. I'm merely archiving it here.

Jack slinks up behind him, up onto the forecastle deck where James has the job nobody else is particularly designed—or inclined, quite frankly—to do: keep watch. James isn't sure if this post is good for his sanity. Being on watch lets him think, but it highlights why these men below him—not so different from him, after all, except in how much more they've seen of this sea, and from what different position—decline to dwell on their circumstances too much. James's thoughts carry out over the water, but that carries him places he can't go, reminds him of things he can't do or be. Not anymore. Luckily, he rarely has more than an hour or two to himself before Jack makes his appearance and he's reminded of at least one of the simple pleasures of this sort of life: doing absolutely as one likes with whomever one pleases.  
  
Jack always slinks toward him, never simply walks; slides with that curious mix of completely sure and carefully tentative and wholly determined. How could anyone, even a wrecked and hollowed-out man, ignore for long this creeping, the way he can feel him before he touches him? James smells his musky old coat and, underneath that smell, the warm sent of his body, as he finally gets close enough to lay a hand on his back, whisper in his ear. He's always whispering, speaking low and steady and often rhythmic, at least when he's telling the truth. It's the lies that dart out quick and heavy with forced music. Ordinarliy, there is nothing heavy about Jack Sparrow, not even his body when James is bearing all its weight of lithe limbs.  
  
"You…are a philosopher," Jack says suddenly, leaning over quickly to breathe against James's neck; quickly because there's no use anyone knowing, not that they'd believe it. And there's certainly no use doing anything more than this where any stray eye might look for the sails and the sky and find instead the Captain wooing so well—in his own strange but intense way, for reasons still unknown, probably even to himself—he might surely set his compass on it.   
  
James keeps his back straight. "Who the bloody hell knows what I am anymore."  
  
"Such language, Commodore," he says placidly as he comes around perpendicular to him, so they can look each other in the eye.  
  
"I am no longer a Commodore."  
  
Jack waves his hand as if it's a trifle, perhaps hoping to make it so. "Well, you are a very poor watchman, too, from what I see, so you might be a—"  
  
"What?"  
  
"What?"  
  
"You said I was a poor watchman."  
  
"Just a figure of—"  
  
"No, it's not. And it's not in the least true. I'm a better watchman than anyone else on this godforsaken vessel."  
  
"I do believe that is the least insulting name you've ever given my ship. She's growing on you, aye? And as far as best watchman—to be that, one need only stay awake. Hardly a thing to take much pride in."  
  
When then tension springs up in his shoulders—only partly manufactured, because James is beginning to come to terms with the alternative definitions of pride which are the only ones available to him—he thinks Jack will sense it, and he's not wrong. Jack reads him quite well, when he wants to, and now he slips behind him and tugs at the back of his ragged blue coat, smoothing it over at the shoulders so as to feel them under his fingers. When his hands come back down, he says, "You're not a poor watchman."  
  
"Not normally. To be fair, of course," he grouses, "I don't concentrate so well when the Captain is standing nigh on less than half a foot behind me. But that's hardly my—"  
  
Jack touches him then, lightly about the neck as he pulls his hair to the side. His lips light on his neck so fast he wouldn't feel them except Jack's done this many, many times, always like this, always a short soft gesture, risked in public, dared in private, to get him to shut up. It always works.  
  
Jack floats back a bit then, to the other side of the small deck, and James finds that he's actually been holding his breath. There was a time when he would've been apprehensive simply because of Jack's unpredictability. Now he still holds his breath sometimes, even if the trepidation is gone.   
  
Jack says, "I just meant you really do seem more suited to contemplating life's intricacies, as it were, than scrubbing the deck."  
  
"I'm not so sure, but I won't argue. You should take care, though. They will think you're playing favorites."  
  
At that, he snorts, almost as if taken aback. "I hardly believe they'd imagine you've fallen under my good graces. Or especially that you're standing up here because you have certain…talents they don't yet—and will never, mind you—see. Besides, you're saving them from a fate worse than death. Pirates are…restless people. They like to be…active."  
  
"That's rather a nice way of putting it."  
  
"Nice words for…delicate ears."  
  
James finally turns and gives him a droll smirk, and he sees a smile pass over Jack's face before he turns back to the horizon.   
  
James says, "Then why are you so often up here?"  
  
"Because you are," he replies simply, with a slight shrug.  
  
"Horseshit."  
  
He smiles indulgently. "Of course, as you so often do, you'll believe what you like, but I care nothing for having my eye forced to the horizon."  
  
"But do you not believe this is important?"  
  
"Moping?"  
  
"No. Watching for other vessels and weather…and worse."  
  
He feels more than hears Jack step back up behind him. "Aye, indeed. An important job." His voice drops almost imperceptibly: "Why do you think I have  _you_  up here?"  
  
He's being serious, but James is no fool. There are reasons this works, this strange thing they have, and he really wouldn't like to examine the structure of that desperate need stretched between them. For now, it's holding.   
  
As Jack starts to drift away again—as he always does when he thinks he's accomplished some final rhetorical flourish—James grabs his wrist. He can't resist a dig. "A highly evolved sense of self-preservation?"  
  
Jack's mouth forms a soundless round  _oh_  as he chooses between amusement and false astonishment. In the end, he meets his eyes with a stubborn smile and says, "No less…carefully nurtured than your own."  
  
When James lets him go finally, he thinks Jack will go down to the main deck again, to strut the way he always does, relishing the way he can float through the world mostly unimpeded—because the world turns for him, eats out of his hand like a wild bird who will abide no one else but a brazen fool or a man so singularly in tune with the universe that his instinctive doing seems just as right as anything James decides after half a day at the mast. But Jack just lives and things seem to work. And now, rather than going down from the forecastle deck, Jack comes and stands beside him and watches the sun dropping closer and closer to the water. James wonders what sorts of things this man thinks when he takes care to be aware of what's going on in his complicated brain.  
  
But he's too near, now, and it's maddening. As charged as their conversations can be, it's always harder when it's quiet, when there's nothing to do but think of how near they are to one another. So James says, "I have actually studied philosophy. It was part of my tutelage. I hated it."  
  
"Well, that's a great shock," Jack says mock-seriously, with a roll of his eyes.  
  
"What do you mean?"  
  
"You are profoundly suspicious of anything smart that you didn't come up with yourself."  
  
"Fuck you," James mutters.   
  
For only a brief moment, Jack's eyes blaze, and James isn't altogether sure if it's real or for show. It has the same effect anyway. But his voice is calm and amused when he says, "You might at least do me the courtesy of calling me Captain when you curse me on my own deck."  
  
"Insubordination generally works best when you actually take care to be insubordinate."  
  
He nods in response; then his brown, still inexplicably kohl-lined eyes focus the way that never fails to make James's stomach flip, and he leans in and says huskily, "But you  _do_ know how much I like to be called Captain."  
  
With a quick elevation of his eyebrows, Jack swoops suddenly down off the observation deck leaving only the rum-sweet smell of his breath and the lingering sharp scent of his body and a twitchyness in James's limbs, along with a warmth in his gut that only spreads as he realizes he still has a while before the sun finishes falling and he's relieved at his post, at least an hour before he can leave off scrutinizing the ocean and things he can't change and ground himself in the endlessly fascinating work of studying Jack Sparrow. His body has already yielded enough clues that it makes this a long watch indeed, where his eyes are on the water and his mind is in Jack's close, dark cabin, in his bed.  
  
He's almost lost in reverie already, but Jack calls up to him from the main deck in that always needling public tone: "To think: you actually still wonder why you're here. It's only that you were obviously never very good at being that man." He gives a slight bow and adds, "Mr. Norrington."  
  
"What are you talking about?" he snaps. "Captain," he adds with a sigh and an almost imperceptible eye roll. Imperceptible to anyone but Jack, anyway.  
  
Jack continues as if uninterrupted. "That man who reads what other people say about the world—people who have never really seen it or lived in it or done anything whatsoever about it—and swallows it all whole. As though it were truth. As though people like that who write books are the sort that actually define such things. I don't think you've ever had much luck being that man." He stands there staring up at him for a moment with a knowing but inscrutable look on his face. Then he smiles, a flicker of the predatory. "At any rate, it's hard to be that when you're under my command, in'it? Carry on," he says with a mock-military salute, adding, "Commodore," as though it were an insult when it's only now occurring to James how much irony has always been there in that title. Perhaps even before Jack Sparrow swooped into his life and made effortless prey of most every principle he had, at least those with an easily definable definition.   
  
That they were things so easy to disarrange makes him uneasy, but he's always uneasy anymore, standing here searching the horizon for exactly where he fits in a world that suddenly seems bigger than it has a right to be. Jack once told him that to a pirate the ocean seems endless. He's never asked him if that's scary or exciting, because to Jack the two are the same thing. Seamlessly one like the horizon at sunset when the water's too reflective with bronze light to be distinguishable from the sky.


End file.
